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Work at Home ScamBusters

Here at Work-At-Home-Magazine.com ScamBusters, we sign up for jobs and business opportunities that we find or that are sent to us that we think is a potential scam and report the details back to you. Some may turn out to be legitimate, some are not. Remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it is.

Have you seen an ad that you'd like us to check out? Contact us and we'll do our best to investigate. Also, come to The Boards. The work at home moms there have seen, heard or participated with just about every scam that's out there.

Latest Scam Report

Get paid to take surveys?

Have you seen the ads for making money by taking surveys for giving your opinion, and they charge you a fee. We've seen these ads everywhere. On national job boards, newspaper ads, signs on the side of the road and ads on the internet. Well, how it works is you pay $29.95 or something around that, and you get access to a page (list) of market research companies that do pay you for surveys. That's it. So basically your paying for a list of companies that pay you to take surveys. Now just because you have a list of companies doesn't mean you will get paid to take surveys. After you register with the market research companies you then have to be selected to participate in the survey(s) or focus groups. Usually, they select survey and focus group participants based of demographics and other information you selected when registering with them.

You don't have to pay for a list of survey companies. We have compiled a list of several survey sites, and we have them for you (for free). Click here for the list of survey companies.

People do make a little extra spending money taking surveys -- and some (particularly focus groups) do pay quite well, but they're not an eight-hour-a-day type of job. I wouldn't plan on getting rich by taking surveys.

About Scams

Financial obligations can be tough, and many moms want the opportunity to stay home yet still earn money. Because of this, moms have become a big target for work-at-home scams. It's been estimated that $40 billion a year is lost to scams in the United States alone. It's estimated that 6 million people answer classified ads each year regarding money scams. These ads practically jump off the page, grabbing at our fantasies and checkbooks. They all sound too good to be true, and they are.

Plain and simple, scams appeal to our greedy side. I think just about everybody would love to make millions of dollars without having to lift a finger (a reason scams do so well). I can't tell you how many times I have seen those ads and wondered, "Maybe this one is the big moneymaker."

We simply don't want to admit these ads are lying to us. We really want to believe that we could be making easy money by assembling crafts or stuffing envelopes as our children play at our feet. When we see the same ads over and over again, we become convinced they have to be true. If these companies were dishonest they would have been put out of business long ago, right? Wrong.

It is very difficult to catch scammers. Usually they advertise out of state and have a pack of lawyers working for them. This means that if you were to take them to court, you'd have to travel to the state their company resides in, costing you more money than you'd try to win back from them in court. Worse, most scammers who are put out of business simply start another one under a new name. Below we've oulined how to report a scam.

How to report a Scam ?

• Call your local state attorney's office.
• Call the Better Business Bureau in the city or state of the scammer.
• Call your local consumer protection agency.
• Call the National Fraud Information Center at 1-800-876-7060. You can also find it on the Internet at http://www.fraud.org/.
• If you received the information by mail, call your local post office and report the scammer.
• If you have a consumer problem or complaint, write to the Federal Trade Commission. Although the agency cannot act to resolve individual problems, it can act when it sees a pattern of possible law violations. Write to Correspondence Branch, Federal Trade Commission, 6th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C., 20580, or call 202-326-2418. You can also find the Web site at http://www.ftc.gov/.